Moleculin Discovers Potential Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer

Moleculin Biotech (NASDAQ:MBRX) announced the discovery of a metabolic inhibitor with the potential to treat pancreatic cancer.
As quoted in the press release:

“We’ve received a lot of attention from the scientific community for our glucose decoy technology (WP1122 Portfolio, Moleculin Presents Preclinical Data of Novel Inhibitor of Glycolysis at 28th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, December 13, 2016) as a potential means to starve tumors to death by exploiting their hyper-dependence on glycolysis for energy production,” commented Walter Klemp, Chairman and CEO of Moleculin, “and now we have identified possible new properties of our compound WP1234, a modification to WP1122. In pre-clinical testing, WP1234 has shown improved drug characteristics when compared with WP1122 and a 20 to 50-fold greater ability to kill pancreatic cancer cell lines when compared with traditional inhibitors of glycolysis. We know that pancreatic cancer thrives even in a reduced oxygen environment, which indicates it may be highly dependent on glycolysis to survive. This discovery now makes WP1234 a promising drug candidate to be studied for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.”
Mr. Klemp continued: “Pancreatic cancer is still considered largely untreatable, so even modest gains in treating this disease could represent a significant clinical benefit. WP1234 improves on known inhibitors for glycolysis by increasing drug circulation time, which should increase the potential for drug uptake by and destruction of tumor cells. We are excited about the potential to pursue development opportunities with WP1234 for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. We are also pleased to report that this discovery was the direct result of our ongoing collaboration with M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the science team there will be presenting detailed findings to the scientific community in the near future.”

Click here to read the full press release.

Source: www.marketwired.com